A review by jessrock
The Best American Essays 2005 by Robert Atwan, Susan Orlean

3.0

I saw this on a display rack at the library, Susan Orlean's name caught my eye because I really liked [b:The Orchid Thief|228345|The Orchid Thief A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle)|Susan Orlean|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255578155s/228345.jpg|911511], and there turned out to be several writers in the collection whose names I recognized. I particularly wanted to read the Oliver Sacks essay, and was interested to check out the selections from David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, David Sedaris, and a few others. I enjoyed reading the collection, but it didn't really introduce me to any new writers I got especially excited about, and I was disappointed to find that the Oliver Sacks essay was just another revisitation of the [b:Awakenings|14456|Awakenings|Oliver Sacks|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166606317s/14456.jpg|2755549] story of the post-encephalitic patients, with a slightly different angle (people's experience of time). David Foster Wallace's (predictably overlong and annotated) essay from Gourmet magazine may have been the most interesting one in spite of its length - he set out to review a lobster festival in Maine and ended up reflecting on animals' experience of pain and the need for the sort of people who read Gourmet magazine to reflect on the pain that goes into the food they eat. He doesn't make any judgment calls, just presents his research about what lobsters and other animals experience as they're boiled alive or otherwise killed, which I thought was a pretty interesting angle given the magazine it was published in. Overall, I don't regret reading this collection of essays, but there wasn't much that was exceptional about it, and it's not really worth seeking out to read when there are so many better books of essays out there.